Community cable television systems typically offer a variety of services including a group of channels identified as basic service, and one or more pay services such as movie channels, sports channels, business and financial channels, each assigned to a specific channel with a separate monthly service charge so as to enable a subscriber to select from among the various cable services and thereby establish a monthly billing corresponding to the sum of the individual cable service charges. The present technique employed to authorize the subscriber selected services for viewing is controlled by the cable system operator through a television set-top converter located within the premises of the subscriber. Integrity and security of the set-top converter can be readily compromised by subscriber tampering with the set-top converter in efforts to secure unauthorized cable television services. It is thus an objective of the cable television industry to remove the cable service function from the subscriber's premises to an intermediate point between the source of cable television services and the individual subscriber's premises. The utility pole or underground interconnect associated with each subscriber's premises represents a particularly attractive location for a remote cable television service authorization control unit.
The principal advantage to the remote control approach is that it delivers to the subscriber's premises only those authorized and paid for cable television services. This is in contrast to the conventional set-top converter approach whereby all available cable television services enter the subscriber's premises and the selective authorization process is implemented in the set-top converter.
Unfortunately, the current approaches for transferring the authorization process from the subscriber's premises to strand-mounted equipment located on a utility pole or within an underground conduit rely on the use of electronic switching techniques which are very expensive and complex. Each channel of cable television service requires numerous components and the implementation of the multi-channel authorization process often reduces the overall effectiveness of the authorization control process.